Emotions
This is the functional problem of emotions.
What is mapping from situations (input) to feelings, bodily response patterns, facial expressions (output)?
The consequentialist view says that rationality means performing actions that do this.
What is bring about the best outcomes (aka the outcomes that are most desirable to you) (in other words, actions that maximize utility)?
Heuristics are strategies that rely on this reasoning system.
What is system 1?
This is a prediction of the future cumulative expected reward that will come about if you start in a particular state, take a particular action, and behave optimally thereafter.
What is a Q-Value?
Josh Greene proposes that personal moral dilemmas trigger these, which are not present in impersonal moral dilemmas.
What is “alarm bell” emotions?
This brain structure is the first stop on both the high road and low road in LeDoux’s model.
What is the thalamus?
An agent with a γ (gamma) value very close to 1 has this preference regarding discounting the future.
What is, the agent will not discount the future very much (they are patient, willing to wait)?
Buying stock in a company just because you “just like it” is an example of this heuristic.
What is the affect heuristic?
This is the functional problem of reinforcement learning.
What is mapping from states (input) to actions (output) that maximize long-term discounted expected utility?
This moral theory says that taking action in both the footbridge and bystander trolley problem scenarios is morally right.
What is Utilitarianism?
This is a “con” of the James-Lange Theory.
What is:
The bodily response profile can’t always explain what makes emotions feel different from “cold” beliefs
The bodily response profile can’t explain what makes one emotion different than another
The following story demonstrates this concept about rationality and decision making: John has $0 in his bank account right now. He takes a walk around the neighborhood, and finds $10 on the ground which makes him very very excited! The following week, John wins the lottery and is now a millionaire. He goes on another walk, and finds $10 on the ground again, which doesn’t excite him very much.
What is diminishing marginal utility (every additional gain in money tends to produce a smaller amount of subjective “benefit” to the agent)?
The “Letter N” study demonstrates this heuristic.
What is the availability heuristic?
Q-values are represented in this region of the brain.
What is the ventral medial prefrontal cortex?
According to Greene, the presence of this triggers emotional responses in participants when confronted with a personal moral dilemma.
What is personal force?
In the flimsy bridge study, participants misattributed their bodily response to attraction/arousal toward the person at the end of the bridge rather than the scariness of the flimsiness of the bridge, suggesting that this happens after the bodily response pattern.
What is conscious interpretation of bodily response pattern?
This is the problem with the take “maximize expected utility.”
What is, it can’t handle time/delays?
Adjusting the Linda Bank teller problem in this way makes people more likely to select the “rationally correct” answer.
What is present the problem in terms of frequencies (whole numbers, rather than percentages)?
An α (alpha) value very close to 1 tells us this about the agent.
What is it, the agent has a fast learning rate (the new information the agent learns will greatly influence their new Q-value prediction)?
This moral theory says that fast, intuitive emotional processes can generate trustworthy outputs (moral judgments) in response to personal moral dilemmas.
What is Universal Moral Grammar?
One can consciously know that airplanes are a very safe form of transportation, and yet still have a strong fear of flying. This phenomenon demonstrates this characteristic feature of modularity within the fear module.
What is informational encapsulation? (Our fear module does not have access to our conscious, central cognition that knows that flying is safe.)
This is a problem with the take “maximize expected objective value.”
What is:
it fails to consider diminishing marginal utility
it can’t expand beyond financial/monetary decisions?
Unlike the middle-ground take that we adopt in this course regarding the organization of the mind, the Evolutionary Psychology Research Program believes this.
What is, the mind is massively modular? (rather than having a central cognition with some modules)
You’re in state st. You take action at, which sends you into the next state, st+1. st+1 is a terminal node. This is the value of maxat+1Q(st+1, at+1).
What is 0?
The Doctrine of Double Effect says this.
What is, it is permissible to cause a foreseen but unintended harm as a side effect (”double effect”) of bringing about a good end (even though it is not permissible to cause such a harm as a means to bringing about the same good end)?